The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  In 1792, a year before, a schoolmaster from Montpellier called Courdin had addressed the Comité d'instruction publique, expressing his support for the idea of equal educational opportunity and full political rights for women, but adding a caution: ‘Je ne crois pourtant pas que l'exécu-tion d'un tel projet puisse de long-temps être utile. La culture de la raison n'a pas encore assez perfectionné la race humaine dans les deux sexes.’17

  Courdin was right: having given the lead to the world in feminist practice, France crushed its own movement at birth. By 1795 the Comité d'instruction publique was receiving speeches suggesting that the proper activity of schoolgirls was washing their brothers' shirts. By 1822 Stendhal was complaining that the education of women was ‘la plus plaisante absurdité de l'Europe moderne’.18 Although the French produced a new translation of the Vindication in 1826, in the wave of enthusiasm for women's rights that preceded the 1830 revolution, the first state secondary schools for girls were not established until three more revolutions had taken place, in 1880. French women were not granted the vote until 1945.

  On 10 November 1793, however, a use was found for some women: young girls of suitable appearance, spotless reputation and respectable background, were sought to impersonate the goddess of reason in every French city for the newly established Fête de la Raison. ‘Chasté cérémonie, triste, séche, ennuyeuse’ said Michelet, who took the trouble to look up one of these goddesses many years later. He observed with satisfaction that she had never been beautiful, ‘et de plus elle louchait’.

  [14]

  A Book and a Child

  By the time the Festival of Reason was celebrated, Mary was alone again, this time in no idyllic garden but in a city full of soldiers. Almost as soon as she and Imlay had begun to live together (probably in the Faubourg St Germain where most of his friends were settled) he announced that he must leave. He had to go to Le Havre to attend to business matters there, but hoped to be back soon. Mary was left to her pregnancy, the book she had begun work on at Neuilly – A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution - a round of prison visits and all too frequent news of the executions of her friends. One day she walked through the Place de la Révolution and, seeing the ground soaked in blood under the guillotine, exclaimed her horror and had to be warned to hold her tongue and depart quickly.1

  With Gilbert in Le Havre, she took to letter writing again, though her comments on public affairs were necessarily guarded. She remarked that she expected the whole of Europe to be in a state of convulsion for the next fifty years, but it was not safe to go into any greater detail than this in writing. Robespierre was not mentioned until after his death, and none of the Girondins was named. When Helen Williams came out of prison in December she warned Mary it was dangerous even to be writing her book; she herself had destroyed the papers Madame Roland entrusted to her when she visited her in the Ste Pélagie prison. But Mary did not take this caution too seriously and was justly proud of the fact that she continued to work on her book through her pregnancy. The steady effort to keep thinking and writing was the more impressive when set beside her letters to Imlay, which show her as a creature almost entirely at the mercy of emotional impulse.

  A few of her letters to her lover were relaxed and colloquial, with ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and domestic jokes about his slippers, but most were written in a less easy mood; some characteristic Wollstonecraftiana put in its appearance early on: ‘Life is but a labour of patience: it is always rolling a great stone up a hill; for, before a person can find a resting-place, imagining it is lodged, down it comes again, and all the work is to be done over anew!’2

  Of course life in Paris was horrifying by any standards, and it is not surprising she grew depressed. Imlay did not shine as a correspondent, and his American friends were not inclined to burnish his reputation during his absence for Mary's benefit. Rather, they seem to have been disposed to tease her for her solemnity over the affair. One of them made a remark that upset her enough to make her despondent and ill (a disorder of the bowels, she very frankly informed her lover) for several days. She suffered, dashed off angry letters when he prolonged his absence, trembled before his replies, feared she had injured the baby by her emotion: ‘the little twitcher’ she called it, and was much alarmed by a pause in the twitchings. After this scare she determined to be calmer and take more exercise: ‘my mind has always hitherto enabled my body to do whatever I wished’ she announced firmly, in the manner of Holcroft.

  The poor baby was to receive every sort of jolt, including a small ideological one; in October France established a new calendar and found itself in the middle of Vendé-miaire, l'an II de la république. The week was stretched into a ten-day decade, and the months poetically renamed Brumaire, Nivôse, Germinal, Fructidor and so on; there were even plans to divide the day into ten-hour periods. A pregnancy thus became a matter of twenty-eight décades rather than forty weeks, and the little creature conceived in August 1793 was due not in May 1794 but in Floréal, l'an II.

  Whatever the date and the calculation involved, she had presently to confess her condition to friends and acquaintances: ‘Finding that I was observed, I told the good women, the two Mrs —'s, simply that I was with child: and let them stare! and —, and —, nay, all the world, may know it for aught I care! – Yet I wish to avoid —'s coarse jokes.’ It is not hard to sense the nervousness under the defiant front here; her mind and her body can indeed do whatever she wills, but at a price. To hold oneself perpetually braced is not comfortable, and so there follows a stiff little lecture on the natural right of the mother to her child, ‘considering the care and anxiety a woman must have about a child before it comes into the world’. The male bird protects the female, observes Mary, ‘but it is sufficient for a man to condescend to get a child, in order to claim it. A man is a tyrant.’

  Still the tyrant had to be placated with tender epilogues: ‘I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you.’ Or with explanations: ‘When I am hurt by the person most dear to me, I must let out a whole torrent of emotions, in which tenderness would be uppermost, or stifle them altogether.’

  But already these attempts to explain herself were meeting with a fairly blank reception. Her hints about how she might be mending her stockings whilst he read to her met with no invitation to join him in Le Havre: he simply said he could not leave. At Christmas she was still alone, except for visits to friends. Ruth Barlow and Madeleine Schweitzer had both become dear to her, and according to John Stone he spent his Christmas with ‘the Barlows, Payne, Williams, Wollstonecraft and some others’.3 Stone's next letter announced that ‘Rights of Woman is writing a huge work, but it will be as dull as Dr Moore's Chronicle, and probably as inaccurate.* His malice extended to reports on the Christie scandal too: in December Catherine Claudine brought a successful court case against Thomas, suing for a pension and the return of Julie. Whether her child was ever returned is not known, and she is unlikely to have received a penny of her pension, since Christie was absent and in difficulties over money himself.

  With Imlay gone Mary's financial situation had also become more difficult. Hitherto he had cashed her orders for her as Johnson managed to get them through, but now she was dependent on Imlay sending her something through his friends. She did not like taking his money, and did not care for his friends, but she was at the mercy of her situation. In difficulties, Mary usually opted for action, and in January, finding Imlay still not disposed to return, she took the coach for Le Havre. She was halfway through her pregnancy.

  Le Havre was a strongly Jacobin town; in July it had renamed itself Havre-Marat. But it was tolerant of its old-established English trading community, and it was in the lodgings of an English soap merchant called John Wheatcroft that Imlay settled Mary to await the birth of the baby. Nobody knew her in Havre-Marat. The people were absorbed in politics and the problems of food supplies, chiefly interested in getting goods through the attempted blockade by the English fleet. She was an an
onymous pregnant woman, honoured as women in her condition are in France, where the birthrate is low and new citizens are always welcome.

  Imlay had many complaints to make about embargoes and the inefficiency of the French. Mary lamented only the lack of books and newspapers.4 In March he had to make a short trip to Paris. Her letters flew lovingly after him:

  We are such creatures of habit, my love, that, though I cannot say I was sorry, childishly so, for your going, when I knew that you were to stay such a short time, and I had a plan of employment; yet I could not sleep. I turned to your side of the bed, and tried to make the most of the comfort of the pillow, which you used to tell me I was churlish about; but all would not do.

  She used the period of his absence to finish her book. The interest of the Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution is not in the factual element, since the narrative breaks off before the date of her arrival in France, and she gave no sources for her information; it is largely in its sidelong glances at her own experience, and in the passages where she tried to formulate her political faith. For instance, she resumed her quarrel with Burke: ‘Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts’ he had written.5 ‘What is often termed virtue, is only want of courage to throw off prejudice’6 answered Mary. She knew her opinion might appear ‘daringly licentious, as well as presumptuous’ but was not (of course) deterred by that: and as a woman who now felt very little bound to any class, religion or even national allegiance, she may have felt uniquely qualified to test her point of view in private life as well as becoming the apologist for its larger political application. What she had not yet grasped was the price exacted by the prejudiced from those who go in for moral pioneering.

  In another wonderful, quite unexpected and prophetic passage she attacked the dehumanizing effect of industrialization:

  The destructive influence of commerce is felt in a variety of ways. The most pernicious, perhaps, is its producing an aristocracy of wealth, which degrades mankind, by making them only exchange savageness for tame servility, instead of acquiring the urbanity of improved reason. Commerce also… obliges the majority to become manufacturers rather than husbandmen; and then the division of labour, solely to enrich the proprietor, renders the mind entirely inactive. The time which… is sauntered away in going from one part of an employment to another, is the very time that preserves the man from degenerating into a brute… thus are whole knots of men turned into machines, to enable a keen speculator to become wealthy; and every noble principle of nature is eradicated by making a man pass his life in stretching wire, pointing a pin, heading a nail, or spreading a sheet of paper on a plain surface.7

  Mary's feeling for what was feasible and right in human arrangements, and what was wrong and degraded, makes her sound here something like a founding mother of utopian socialism; we are only beginning to heed that particular message now. If she sometimes lacked moral sensitivity in her private dealings, it appeared much oftener in her political thinking.

  She maintained that the great need of the age was for political scientists who could deal with the sort of questions she raised, and blamed the lack of them for the anarchic conditions prevailing in France. She no longer sought to extenuate violence at all, and considered it a primary duty of any government to control it. On the other hand, she had no regrets for the passing of the monarchy:

  The will of the people being supreme, it is not only the duty of their representatives to respect it, but their political existence ought to depend on their acting comformably to the will of the constituents. Their voice in enlightened countries, is always the voice of reason.8

  The difficulty over what ought to be the voice of reason and whether it could be relied on in practice she glossed over rather quickly, and had the same trouble in considering the freedom of the press: she endorsed it passionately, but was distressed by its effects. In spite of problems like this, which better minds than hers have found no more tractable, she remained convinced that ‘Frenchmen had reason to rejoice, and posterity will be grateful’; and that the critics of the Revolution had misunderstood it: ‘malevolence has been gratified by the errors they have committed, attributing that imperfection to the theory they adopted, which was applicable only to the folly of their practice.’9 And although she saw ‘a race of monsters’ rising to power as she wrote, she did not let her fear of them panic her into abandoning her belief in social justice.

  Her credo was expressed in a way that is hard to improve on:

  That there is a superiority of natural genius among men does not admit of dispute; and that in countries the most free there will always be distinctions proceeding from superiority of judgement and the power of acquiring more delicacy of taste, which may be the effect of the peculiar organization, or whatever cause produces it, is an incontestable truth. But it is a palpable error to suppose, that men of every class are not equally susceptible of common improvement; if therefore it be the contrivance of any government to preclude from a chance of improvement the greater part of the citizens of the state, it can be considered in no other light than as monstrous tyranny, equally injurious to the two parties, though in different ways. For all the advantages of civilization cannot be felt, unless it pervades the whole mass, humanizing every description of men – and then it is the first of blessings, the true perfection of man.10

  She also wrote to Everina during this time, a long letter in which she expressed her conflicting feelings about the French:

  My Dear Girl, It is extremely uncomfortable to write to you thus without expecting, or even daring to ask for an answer, lest I should involve others in my difficulties, or make them suffer for protecting me. The French are, at present, so full of suspicion that had a letter of James's imprudently sent to me, been opened, I would not have answered for the consequences. I have just sent off a great part of my MS. which Miss Williams would fain have had be burn [sic], following her example, and to tell you the truth, my life would not have been worth much, had it been found. It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind. The climate of France is uncommonly fine, the country pleasant, and there is a degree of ease, and even simplicity in the manners of the common people, which attaches me to them – Still death and misery in every shape of terror haunts this devoted [meaning ‘doomed’ or ‘cursed’] country - I certainly am glad I came to France because I never would have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded – AND I have met with some uncommon instances of friendship which my heart will ever gratefully store up, and call to mind when the remembrance is keen of the anguish it has endured for its fellow-creatures at large – for the unfortunate beings cut off around me and the still more unfortunate survivors.11

  Another passage at the end of her book presented the ambiguities of her attitude towards the Revolution even more neatly:

  It is, perhaps, in a state of comparative idleness – pursuing employments not absolutely necessary to support life, that the finest polish is given to the mind, and those personal graces, which are instantly felt, but cannot be described: and it is natural to hope, that the labour of acquiring the substantial virtues, necessary to maintain freedom, will not render the French less pleasing, when they become more respectable.12

  The tone is prim, but the statement yearns towards a condition in which such a tone would never be heard, in which the imagination, the senses and the graces of life could be cultivated without a perpetual strenuous striving after virtue and shouldering of enormous burdens of social responsibility. Mary had felt the charm of French mœurs, and she was never able to forget it again; indeed, the narrow-minded censure of the English middle class made it seem all the more attractive.

  And from now on she began to express a definite preference for life in France. She hoped her sisters might join her there once the war was over, and persistently said she wanted her child to be brought up in France. Remembering her
belief that women lived below the level at which politics affect life, she seems all the same to have found things better for her sex in France. Maybe she felt too what Herzen expressed later, that there was more mental freedom even under the tyrannies of the continent than under the relatively liberal government of England, where the moral standards of provincial ladies could blast and wither a reputation and indeed a life. As far as the child about to be born was concerned she was fully justified in this belief.*

  In April the Barlows visited Le Havre briefly. Mary discussed dresses and shirts and baby clothes with Ruth, and after she left wrote to say she had entirely finished her book and was now expecting the arrival of the ‘lively animal’ at any time. She had to wait until the twenty-fifth of Floréal (14 May); a French midwife attended her and her labour, though ‘uphill work’, was gone through with triumphant ease and rapidity. The baby, a girl, was born at two in the afternoon and judged an admirable creature. Apparently Gilbert and Wheatcroft carried her straight round to the Maison Commune du Havre-Marat to register her birth:

  Le vingt cinquième jour Floréal l'an Second de la république française une et indivisible en la salle de la maison Commune du Havre Marat devant nous Charles François Renardet officier public du premier arrondissement de la ditte Commune a été présenté un enfant femelle que le Citoyen Jean Wheatcroft, fils, fabricant de savon, nous a déclaré être né Ce Jour deux heures après midi en son domicile rue de Corderie section des Sans Culottes, et être issu du légitime mariage du citoyen Guilbert Imlay, négociant amériquain, présens, avec la Citoyenne Marie Wolstonecraft son Epouse, lequel enfant a été nommé Françoise, par le dit Wheatcroft fils, et par la citoyenne Marie Michelle Dorothée son Epouse.13